3 September 2014

Any one of the eleven short Theses on Feuerbach
(attached) would be adequate on its own as a topic for discussion in a study
circle. The most famous of them is the last one:

“Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.”

The attached document shows
Marx, in 1845, as being firmly in the camp of those humanists for whom the
active, free-willing Subject is the centre and the starting point of all
philosophy and all politics.

It puts Marx in the opposite
camp from those “materialists” who regard the human as derivative of, and
secondary to, the purely physical. Marx never shifted from this strong and
logical position. Marx poses the Subject in a dialectical relation with the
Objective universe, but the Subject is the one with the initiative. The Subject
makes things happen. The Subject can change the world – and that’s the point.

This is different from the
idealism that ignores the material world, and it is equally different from the
materialism that prioritises the mechanical over the mental. Thus, Marx settles
the controversy over “dialectical materialism” right here, at the very beginning
of Marxism.

Ludwig Feuerbach’s
intervention into the philosophical debates of the early 1840s created a
sensation in the intellectual crucible that included Marx and Engels as well as
the “Young Hegelians”, with whom Marx and Engels were in the process of falling
out.

Reading the eleven “Theses”
reveals that Marx immediately recognised Feuerbach as a materialist, but also
that he at once rejected Feuerbach’s particular and limited kind of
anti-subjective materialism.

Thesis number two says that
truth is a practical question. This is something that is repeated later on in
the “classics” of Marxism. It reinforces the assertion that the world or
universe is a human world or universe. “It
is men who change circumstances” says Marx in the third Thesis, and “human activity or self-change can be
conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

The subsequent Theses develop
this understand through to Thesis 10 which says: “The standpoint of the old
materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or
social humanity.”

This is a good reminder that
for Marx in particular, the term “civil society” only means “bourgeois society”
[bürgerlichen Gesellschaft], and that
therefore for Marxists, “civil society” is something to be overcome and
transcended, and certainly not something to be put on a pedestal and
worshipped.